Service Problems

That problem confronted both the Confederate States of America and the United States during the Civil War, and it eventually forced each to resort to conscription to fill the ranks. In both cases, the draft led to denunciations of the conflict as “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.” Where raising troops had been a job left to the states before the Civil War, conscription, North and South, was Exhibit A of the increasing centralization and power of both federal governments.

With a considerably smaller population of 9 million (about 4 million of them slaves) to the North’s 22 million, the Confederates were the first to resort to a draft. That came in April 1862, and it targeted men between 18 and 35 years old. A change in October 1862 raised the age limit to 45 and another in February 1864 expanded the pool further, to boys of 17 and men as old as 50.

In devising its conscription law, the Confederacy took a modern approach, assessing the nation’s needs and manpower holistically and taking critical occupations into account. Railroad workers, telegraph operators, teachers and druggists were among those exempt from the draft. Only sons and men with physical disabilities were also excused, as were men who owned or worked as an overseer for 20 slaves or more. Not surprisingly, the South experienced a sudden burst of new schools and drugstores when the law passed, but otherwise the Confederates instituted a full mobilization of its manpower.

Still, many Southerners resented what they believed was an infringement on individual freedoms, and the governors of Georgia and North Carolina resisted the Davis administration’s efforts. Georgia Gov. Joseph E. Brown said that nothing the United States had done to his state was as damaging to liberty as the draft. Suddenly both states were bursting with militiamen and civil servants, jobs that were among those protected by the draft law.

Photo

A blindfolded man draws names for the draft.Credit Library of Congress

It was the classist aspects of the laws that most offended poor and yeoman Southerners. The original law allowed men to hire a substitute, an option plainly available only to people with means. That part of the law was overturned in December 1863. But the more offensive 20-slave exemption never was.

The law was a response to the pleas of slave mistresses whose men were at war. Letters poured into politicians’ offices with accounts from women who were afraid of slave uprisings or whose chattel would not follow their instructions. Poor whites screamed at the unfairness of the 20-slave rule, but their objections went unheeded.

Although its conception of the draft was modern, the Confederacy’s administration of conscription was positively byzantine. In some parts of the South the Davis administration ran the program. In others, the states were responsible for raising the men. And in yet other places the Confederate Army administered the job. Nevertheless, the South’s universal approach to the draft was highly effective. About 80 percent of military-age white men in the Confederacy served in the Army.

The Union didn’t institute a draft until Congress passed the Enrollment Act in March 1863, the first ever in the nation’s history. Despite superior organization and resources, the North had in many ways a much harder task. Unlike the Confederacy, the North hoped that its system would induce more men to volunteer rather than lose face as a draftee. Like the South, the North had categories of exemptions, but because the North had so many more people, Congress did not have to consider the full management of the economy and society as closely as the Confederates did.

The result was a Napoleonic approach to the draft. Every state had a quota of men to fill, and those quotas were broken down to the township level. If an area met its quota through volunteers, there would be no draft. If a draft had to take place, a trustworthy resident – preferably a blind man – would draw the names of 20- to 45-year-old single men from a large drum or a hat. Draftees had time to hire a substitute, buy their way out of the service through a $300 commutation fee (legal until mid-1864) or go into the service voluntarily.

If the modus operandi was old-fashioned, the administration was modern. A new agency, the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau, was built from scratch in an astonishingly short time. With little direction from Congress, the provost marshal general, James B. Fry, created a series of protocols for his men, hired a staff, selected the three members of each local draft board, conducted a nationwide census of military-age men and had his agency conscripting within three months.

By law, the provost marshal had to have at least one office in every congressional district in the Union, though it often had satellite offices. Each office employed clerks and other functionaries, but many also had spies or agents on the payroll, since the law charged the bureau with tracking down deserters and draft dodgers.

Very quickly, Fry interpreted part of his mission as rooting out any real or potential threats to conscription. All over the country, his underlings kept close tabs on the disaffected and dissidents, worried that they would impinge on the government’s ability to raise men for the Army. The reports from the men in the field streamed steadily into Fry’s headquarters in Washington. The level of surveillance was such that the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau was, functionally, the first domestic intelligence agency in American history.

Related

Fry’s men had legitimate reason for concern. In communities across the North, enrolling officers were targets for men who opposed the draft. Agents were shot at, sometimes killed; their houses or barns torched; their livestock killed. Enlisted men deserted at the urgings of antiwar Democrats. Draftees were known to maim themselves so they would fail the army’s physical, and many fled to the West or to Canada to avoid service. Draft riots broke out in a number of cities and towns, the most notable taking place in New York in July 1863, just days after the Battle of Gettysburg. The mob action in New York remains the largest civil disturbance the nation has ever known.

Those were not the only complications that the bureau faced. The federal government offered a bounty, or cash bonus, to induce men to enlist voluntarily. As the war ground on and the death toll mounted, state and local governments offered their own bounties to fill quotas, often hoping to attract outsiders to serve in place of their own men.

The sums of money involved could amount to $1,000 or more, and this, not surprisingly, led to rampant fraud. For a percentage, brokers would link potential soldiers with communities offering high bounties, then bolt with the entire sum. Bounty jumping – where men would enlist, take the money, run to another community and then repeat the process – was an uncontrolled and seemingly uncontrollable problem.

The success of the Union draft is debatable. Only about 2 percent of the 2.1 million federal soldiers were drafted into the service, and they had a terrible reputation for their performance in the field. About 6 percent of the Army was composed of substitutes. Most historians regard the draft as a success only in that it seems to have stirred thousands of men to enlist rather than be tarred as conscripts.

As for the legality of conscription, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1863, but the case had little impact outside of legal circles and never made its way to the United States Supreme Court. That happened only after World War I, in 1919, when the federal justices unanimously ruled against Joseph Arver and other Minnesota draft resisters. One of Arver’s arguments was that conscription was a form of involuntary servitude and therefore violated the 13th Amendment, which had formally freed all slaves in 1865.

The Provost Marshal General’s Bureau witnessed the end of the Civil War with its powers intact. Over Fry’s strenuous objections, the end of the war marked the end of the agency. It was shuttered and out of business by the middle of 1866, and the country would not undergo another draft until the Woodrow Wilson administration.

What's Next

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.